Negotiating Gender, Policy and Politics in the Caribbean: Feminist Strategies, Masculinist Resistance and Transformational Possibilities by Gabrielle Hosein & Jane Parpart

Author:Gabrielle Hosein & Jane Parpart [Hosein, Gabrielle & Parpart, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783487509
Google: -mIujgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 28281797
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2016-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Narratives, the State and National Gender Policies in the Anglophone Caribbean

Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago

Deborah McFee

After the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, a number of territories in the Anglophone Caribbean committed themselves to the development of National Gender Policies (NGPs). These NGPs are multisectoral plans located in the technical language of public policy and the state, developed to provide a plan for the pursuit of gender equity and equality throughout the respective territories. The experience regionally has not been uniform. As different states initiate these national plans, the results and processes have been as varied and as complex as the Caribbean region itself. The diversity of outcomes, the various narratives attached to the NGPs’ development, and the sources of resistance within, and external to, the state, provide invaluable insights into how regional populations interface with, understand, create and articulate meanings around public policy as it relates to women and Gender and Development (GAD).

This chapter seeks to rethink the relationship between policy implementation, policy design and the politics of policymaking (Mosse 2004, Parpart, Exploring the Transformative Potential of Gender Mainstreaming Limits and Possibilities 2014). Diverting from traditional measuring of the success of policy science, policymaking, bureaucracy and public management measured through the efficiency of implementation (Lodge and Hood 2003, Hood and Lodge 2004, Howlett 2010), this investigation prioritizes broader societal contexts and actors as determinants of outcomes in the politics of policymaking. The intent is to facilitate the application of a feminist critical perspective that questions the dominant intellectual traditions explaining policymaking (Ackelsberg 1992). This is achieved by analysing the process of policymaking and the content of the policy narratives, through which positions within and external to the policy process become apparent. Policy narratives represent spaces where ideologies are owned and rearticulated internal to the state, and are then co-opted by external actors to become public discourses. These public discourses provide a context-specific understanding of the ways in which women, and GAD gain or lose traction through the presence or absence of a broader population-based buy-in to the policy process.

REGIONAL OVERVIEW AND CRITICAL JUNCTURES

In the Anglophone Caribbean, the Cayman Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Belize have all publicly committed to drafting at least one NGP. Belize is the only territory which has embarked upon two policy cycles. In some territories, NGPs have proven particularly vulnerable to policy termination at any given stage of development or implementation, while in other territories, they have moved easily from drafting to implementation. The critical junctures – from the consultant’s report being accepted by the gender bureau through to the approval of the document for implementation – are pivotal sites when the possibility of termination or the likelihood of passage becomes more apparent. It is at these junctures that the politics of policymaking becomes public. Shifts in the policy audiences and the introduction of new voices and interests in the policy process reveal how policy narratives are being interpreted and negotiated. (See Table 6.1 for a regional overview pf critical junctures in the NGP experience.

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